Dark tourism: the dark side of the earth? It has become increasingly apparent that so-called “Dark Tourism” has been on the rise, socially and culturally, for the past few years. Hundreds of thousands of “tourists” are travelling across the planet to visit sites of either political terror or of memorable battles, always associated with human suffering. For a while now, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp-museum has been the destination for more than a million visitors per year; however, Goree Island in Senegal, the Port-Arthur penal colony in Tasmania or the Holocaust Museum in Washington continue, mutatis mutandis, to attract similarly high numbers. From Asia to South Africa via Rwanda, from Poland to Buenos-Aires or Nanking, there is a plethora of such sites. Does this phenomenon reflect the exotic allure of the past, one to which the memorial scenography produces an illusion of proximity? Does the word “tourism” reduce the complexity of the numerous motivations and practices of groups or individuals who visit memorial and historical sites?

Dark tourism literature Thematic listing This bibliography is the result of extensive research conducted March – May 2016 as the first phase of the AHRC and LABEX-funded project ‘Dark tourism’... Suite